The next thought came to her because she couldn’t face the rest. A tiny one at first, it was a bit of her old self, for, if not resilient, then what was she? Well, so we could begin. We could begin the thing with spares. And later… Her long legs almost gave, she almost fell back on the bed, but her knees snapped into place. No. She could not reframe the thing, tell herself that she was still all right. Such enthusiasm would be false. Branching out, from car parts into baskets, as if souvenirs had been a second, new idea, instead of Sarie’s first, would not be a branching out at all, not from Sarie’s tree. All the wrong way round. But if not that, then what? She let her eyes come open and looked down at her feet. If she was to live at all, she thought, she could not enfold her husband’s vision and pretend that it was hers, couldn’t think of it that way.
She must erase the first idea, what had come to her. Forget everything she had envisaged, say it hadn’t happened: that she had never stood before the Gymkhana looking at a horse, or pulled Agatha behind her into the Mountain Top Hotel, that she had never peered at gems that winked behind a glass. That she had never rubbed her husband’s feet and thought herself his savior. She must: Forget, forget, dismiss. But thinking was too hard, and noting so specifically what she should forget was rather like remembering, the opposite of what she had to do.
She raised her eyes again and tried to see herself. I’m yellow, Sarie thought. Her teeth were caked, rough, filthy. She ran her hands along her throat and ribs. Her hips. She felt her bones protrude. Her tears welled up again. I’m old, she thought. I’m old. She heard Gilbert coming up the stairs. She didn’t wish, just then, for anyone to see her—Gilbert least of all—so very, very bare. So sallow. She reached out for the nearest thing; and, meanly, it was Gilbert’s dirty robe, which he’d left over the chair. How close it felt, how thick.
Gilbert was surprised to see her standing. He came up to her and kissed her. “Sarie, dear.” He tried to hold her hand. Sarie didn’t flinch. She didn’t pull away from him; she didn’t, either, take his hand in hers. Gilbert raised his fingers in the air; they hovered, fluttered, near her head. He would have liked to stroke her cheek, but Sarie’s look—red eyes, mouth closed, confused—persuaded him he shouldn’t. Too soon, he thought. Not yet. He smiled at her and sighed. The sight of his tall wife in his robe—too short for her legs, but, still—was touching. “Don’t you look nice, love? How do you feel?” he said. He wondered if the color suited her. Didn’t lovers sometimes wear each other’s clothes? He had heard (or had he read?) somewhere that local men slept in colored cloths they borrowed from their women, mistresses and wives, to demonstrate their love? Was this what Sarie meant? To say she cared for him, though she found it hard to speak?
Sarie, long-stilled blood now coursing to her feet, felt a sinking in her chest. She leaned without intending to towards Gilbert, and he did, at last, clumsy, eager, dart in to rest his lips a moment on her cheek. He spoke because he didn’t know what else to do—he’d mastered Sarie silent in the bed, but Sarie standing, still upset, looking so worn out, made him a bit nervous. “You know, dear, I think I have an idea.” He sat down behind her.
At the word “idea,” Sarie felt a curdling in her throat. She turned and gazed at him as if at a geological formation that rose up far away, a mountain. An idea. Her gums hurt. She saw once again all of her ideas, how certain she had been about the trinkets and the baskets and the long Dodoma knives, the bright blue shards of stone. She felt foolish in a way she hadn’t felt before—not when ladies at the garden parties had dropped their drinks in horror at her talk, not when Gilbert told her shoes were too expensive, and not when he had so heartlessly insisted that women, if you please, can make or break a man.
She felt tremendously outdone, and stupid, which was worse. She didn’t want to hear Gilbert’s idea, but she didn’t either have the strength to move or cover up her ears. When Gilbert asked her if he could please be introduced to Jeevanjee, who might be just the man to help, Sarie looked at him as though he’d asked her to perform a crazy kind of sex. But she was not entirely surprised. “Your friend Mr. J.,” he said. Why should the world not topple?
It hurt her to hear Majid Ghulam’s name in Gilbert’s clumsy mouth. “You know,” her husband said, “the Jeevanjee you’ve gotten friendly with. The father of that boy.” Sarie heard a ringing in the thickened air and watched as her old husband came in and out of focus not far from her face. Though her eyes had cleared enough to see that he was not a mountain, Sarie saw instead an insect, a knobbed creature, a lizard, on the bed. The Jeevanjee. It sounded like a joke, the name of a small animal, something foreign, quaint. Gilbert’s eyeballs seemed to swell and shrink and spin.
She didn’t say a word. She sank down on the bed, not beside her husband, whose feet were on the floor, who sat, like a man explaining things, but beyond him, where she lay, knees curled into her chest, while Gilbert talked and talked about how useful it would be for him—“for us”—to put his head together with the head of an experienced businessman like this M.G., whom she had so providentially got to know and like. “You do like him, don’t you? He’s all right?” he asked. He turned around to take up one of her hands. “Have you seen him recently?” Sarie made a fist. Looking sweetly down, Gilbert clutched the furled mass tightly, as if, like an envelope that he could open, it might conceal a prize.
As they sat on the bed, Agatha appeared. She hovered in the doorway, made a testing sound. Gilbert looked towards her. “See?” he said. “Your mother’s gotten up.” Agatha did not come in. “Look, Sarie.” Gilbert, for once emboldened by the presence of his daughter, raised a hand to Sarie’s face and firmly pulled her chin towards the door. Sarie looked. She thought, What does the child want? She did not reach out to her. Agatha, as she often did, kept still. She’d been in the courtyard scouring the ground. There were pebbles in the pockets of her dress. “Come on,” Gilbert said. He found he wanted very much for Agatha to be there, near them on the bed. It would have made him feel a little better. We’re a family, he thought. And Sarie wouldn’t cry in front of Agatha; with Agatha, Sarie was robust.
They both turned away from him at once: Sarie lay back down, and Agatha, looking down into a pocket, twisted a thin ankle, bent a knee, unbent it. “I’m going back outside,” she said. And Agatha was gone. They heard her close the door, and then her feet quick on the stairs.
He had not let go of Sarie’s hand. He thought her fist felt looser, and began stroking her thumb. Beneath Gilbert’s spotted skin, where unseen blood and flesh were throbbing with new highways, traffic jams, the wreck and shine of speeding things, Sarie felt the story change. She suddenly could think, and what she thought about was this: her lover’s back and toes and ankles and the flavor of his mouth. At last she opened her closed hand and, hoping idly they would break, squeezed her husband’s fingers. Gilbert thought he understood the fierceness of her grip. Yes, he felt Sarie’s love for him return. He sighed. He lay down on the bed beside her, eyes full no longer of her face but of things that only he could see: the future, years ahead, when things had really changed, a legal business with a sign, an office, and a girl to make the tea. He knew she had agreed. “You’re wonderful,” he said, and kissed her on the brow.
He nestled his own tired head into the pillow. “It could be like this,” he said, and he went on, painted her a picture. When he’d finished talking, Sarie took his robe off, handed it to him, and strode into the bathroom, where she stayed for a long time. Cold in Vunjamguu’s sharp water, adding to it her own tears until she couldn’t anymore, she sat by herself in the dark. Eventually, chill and made of stone, Sarie heard Gilbert go out and felt her strength return.
She made up her mind. Because the hardships and the sadness that swelled and moved inside her were too difficult to think of with precision, Sarie, with a monumental shove against and through her weakened skin, stepped outside of her body to give herself advice. She thought instead of what somebody else, looking at her from a distance, someone with a sense
of History, might tell her. She wondered what Clothilde would do, or Sister Bénédicte. What Angélique might say. She thought of Betty, too. But the voice she heard, the one she gave a sound to, was Mrs. Hazel Towson’s. You are middle-aged. You are past your prime, and Belgian. You are the mother of a daughter. And you also have a husband. That she didn’t want one, or the other, really, was well besides the point. That she liked her short, pale dresses, for all their stains and wear, did not matter at all.
She’d been foolish from the start. How blind she’d been, and silly, thinking she could have two lives, one that moved in time and one that didn’t, ever. How meaningless she’d been. Gilbert’s business—this business in which she, apparently, had no business being—this business, she could clearly see, was more important than anything she might have learned about herself or someone else, or life, or love, at gloomy Kudra House. More important and concrete than whatever Majid Ghulam might want or whatever Sarie might have been, so vaguely, so desirously, attempting. She’d end it. She’d end it then and there and not set eyes, if she could help it, on Majid Ghulam again. Well, she would have to, she supposed, if she did what Gilbert wished. But even then, if she had to greet him on occasion, ask him mildly how things were or inquire about his boys, he would be Mr. Jeevanjee again, that old Mr. J. Perhaps, as Gilbert had called him when she had been in bed, once she’d forgotten everything and become somebody else, the second Sarie with no first, he would simply be “M.G.” She did make one decision, the only one, she thought, that still belonged to her: Foolish I have been, peut-être. But I will not be ashamed.
Twenty-three
On her final visit to the pale green house on Libya Street, Sarie wore a very old but flattering yellow gown that made her hair look bright. From Mchanganyiko to Mahaba and to Mosque and Libya streets, she bit her lips to make her mouth look sharp. She dug her fingernails into the pillows of her palms to make sure her blood was moving. She willed her headache to grow stronger, to keep her heart in line.
In the courtyard, she saw Tahir with his crutches, an entirely strange boy, showing off his moves to a giggling, encouraging Maria, who did not even look up when the alley doors came open and Sarie passed them by. They both glowed, she thought: Tahir nothing like the fallen child she’d spoken to while life poured out of him, but thicker, more substantial, than she’d known, and Maria’s skin was sugary and shiny, like a date’s. The bald cat stepped towards her. Shyly, briefly, it touched its round head to her feet. She did not bend to pet it. Without announcing her arrival or waiting to be called, she walked right up the steps.
The three big boys were out. Majid, as she’d hoped, was up there by himself, in the bedroom working on a verse. She didn’t knock. The door fell open silently. She sat down on the bed, where she could face the mirror. In the watery, browning glass, she watched him. Majid at first did not see her, and Sarie—who was finding that premature nostalgia could serve well as a defense—thought, dramatically, So a poet looks at work!
Hidden by a shadow from the open window’s shutters, Majid’s face was undefined and dark. The skin of Majid’s neck and back and the slope of his thin shoulder, in contrast, seemed to Sarie unusually pale. He held the pencil to his mouth, pressing with a knuckle at his lips. M. G., she thought. The name was uttered at the surface of her mind, not in any secret place. Did not cause her any pain she could distinguish from the pounding at her brow. She felt removed from him and also from herself. As though what would happen in this room would happen elsewhere, not to her, and not to him. To others—Mrs. Gilbert Turner and Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee, a businessman—whom she might recall someday. She felt cold a moment, rubbed her arms with heavy hands. She concentrated on Majid Ghulam, M.G., the brand-new Mr. J. She watched him shake his head over a word he had just written. His tongue slipped out, slipped back. She thought, unmoved, I have licked that tongue. That tongue has licked me. Majid looked at Sarie once, then twice, then put the pencil down. He turned happily around. “You’re here!” he said.
“A poem?” Sarie asked. Majid didn’t answer right away. He said instead that he was very glad to see her. She’d stayed away so long! Dear Sarie. He had missed her. When she did not come back after the day that he’d gone out, he’d thought that she was angry with him, that she wouldn’t come again. “I’m so glad you have come,” he said, and he stretched his arms towards her. There was a lilting in his voice. He had thought about her, her presence and her body. His limbs had missed her, missed how willingly and seriously she gave herself missed that eager drowning look. He came to sit beside her.
Sarie, focused on her mission, didn’t say, I miss you all the time. She said again, “You are working on a poem?”
Majid smiled, wiped his hands against his shirt as if he had been working on a car, on a mechanical endeavor instead of on a verse. “Yes.” His voice was shy and proud. Sarie asked if he would read it. “Later,” he told her, “when it’s really done.” They sat silent for a moment, until Majid pressed his side against her shoulder and slipped a hand between her legs. “Why have you stayed away so long?”
Sarie didn’t move away. Like a person taking up a favored sweet before starting a diet, I’ll enjoy this now, she thought. He kissed her neck and bit it, laughed. Sarie let him move her limbs, let him spread her thighs and lift one knee up above his own. She let him take hold of one breast through her gown; palping, rubbing, at her chest. He even tried to tickle her. But he could see Sarie was cool. “What is it?” Did she seem a little thinner, this big woman who had become almost like a fixture in his mind and house? Were her freckles brighter? Thinking she was playing, he slipped two fingers down into the collar of her dress, palm cupped as if he hoped to scoop a wriggling thing from water. He stroked her, but she didn’t move towards him. “Come, come, Mrs. Turner”—he sometimes called her that, in play—“tell me what it is. What is happening with you?”
Sarie had not known how she would feel upon being close to him again. She had tried to steel herself along the way, had imagined simply sitting in the parlor with him, legs pushed up against the coffee table, explaining how things were. Making her proposal. Not once taking off her clothes or leaning in to kiss him. But she had bypassed the parlor; here she was in Majid’s bedroom, and there he was, asking rather kindly what had kept her from him and could he come in please. She didn’t feel relaxed by it. But there was, she realized, something she did want, that she could take from him.
Let the business wait. With a hooked forefinger and thumb, she grasped Majid Ghulam’s chin, and with her other fingers pulled his lower lip down before crushing, with a ferocity Majid had never felt in her, her great teeth against his. He let her. Sarie trembled everywhere. She panted, grunted at him. She kissed him. She wiped the inside of Majid’s open mouth with the breadth of her wet tongue. She licked his skin below his nose and sucked hard at his chin.
Majid struggled with her. What is this? He wanted at the very least, as Sarie had insisted that she liked, to stop and take her clothes off, give her time to fold her panties in a square and lay them on the floor before he rubbed himself against her. But Sarie didn’t let him. She pinned his arms behind him, forced him backwards on the bed. Much too fast! Not like this! He yelped. But in this he had no say. She rose up mightily and straddled him, knees tight at his small waist. Majid Ghulam was trapped. He watched her in amazement. She pulled his trousers off completely and tore open his shirt. His hands rose up to touch her—soothe her slow her down—but she batted at them, fought them off He protested, and she pushed him down again. Baffled, cold, he watched. She was terrible, a storm. How heavy, long, she was, how very tall and white. She smelled like city dust, like oil, the peels of unfamiliar fruit.
Majid didn’t move, did not know what to do—did he want her? Did he not? He didn’t have the leisure to decide. Towering above him, with one finger flexed and a challenge in her eye, Sarie moved her underclothing just slightly to the side, just enough for what she wanted. She clamped his hips with her big knees and shoved
him upwards on the mattress. His head hit the wooden bed board, hard. “Do it,” Sarie said. She pulled his skull to hers, and when, confused, he kissed her, she bit him on the cheek. And he pushed himself inside of her more fiercely than he ever had into any willing woman, even his Hayaam. Groaning, Sarie clutched the wall. She shouted. Majid Ghulam labored there until he felt his very lungs and heart would pop.
Afterwards, when he finally slipped from her, Sarie fell beside him, and he felt his limbs go free. He shuddered. Experienced a desire both to hold and stroke his lover and to cry or shout at what she’d made them do. What now? She turned away from him to face the wall. Majid pressed his fingers on her spine, releasing, pressing down again, as though patting earth around a plant or tapping on a counter. Sarie didn’t look at him. How quiet the room was. Majid sat up and she let him. He asked her to sit, too. She didn’t. She brought one hand to his thigh and pressed her mouth into the pillow. Looking down at her, Majid rearranged her panties. Pulled her dress over her hips. He stepped into his trousers and put them on again without rising from the bed. He waited while she shook.
Sarie finally spoke. “My husband’s uncle has agreed to send him money, and we will begin a business.” Her husband. Majid bent towards her, pressed his chin against her scalp. He watched her in the mirror, petted her back slowly, until she finally turned around. Sat up. “Oh, Majid,” Sarie said.
Majid watched his lover’s double in the glass rest her head against his shoulder. What was happening between them? What was changing in this room? Was that a bruise now forming on his cheek? Had he bruised her, too? A little breeze came in; the central page of his new notebook stood up straight, then slowly fell again. Mrs. Turner is going into business. He didn’t know quite what she meant, but he was glad for her, of course. “When you are in business, Sarie Turner, will your husband need you always? Will you be too occupied to visit me instead?”
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